Water networks synthesis for industrial parks involving inter-plant allocation

Abstract An industrial park is a cluster of multiple company individuals, so there is requirement to develop specific reuse strategies to improve the utilization of resources across plants. Differing from the direct reuse strategy of ‘unit-based’ mode which is originally proposed for intra-plant water integration, this article presents a ‘plant-based’ mode for water allocation within industrial parks. Wherein, mixers and splitters are involved to present the mixing, transmission and splitting operations for reusing streams across plants. Such that, the mixing possibilities can also be investigated and many redundant solutions can be avoided by considering the number limit of inter-plant stream connections at the building stage of network superstructures. On base of this mode, both direct and direct-indirect-mixed integration problems are studied in this study. Superstructures are established and mathematically formulated aiming to the minimum fresh water consumption. At last, an example from literature is illustrated. With the obtained results, the effectiveness of the approach has been successfully demonstrated.